I still prefer the original. Same for ‘The Fog’. Both came out about the same time I think.
The problem with remakes is that they have to upstage the original, usually by more killings, gore, horror, and graphic images.
That is why the original black and white “The Thing” was so successful. It had limited blood and graphic images, it was shot in black and white, with lots of shadowing (like Hitchcock did), and left some things to the imagination.
I refuse to go see remakes (I’ll look at them on TV once in a while if I have nothing else to do like trim my toenails).
Kurisawa’s “The Magnificent Seven” was a classic, again shot in B & W, with lots of noise. The American version was more true to the original version though it was set in a western motif with an American flavor. However, it did not try to outdo the original, only to slightly modify it.
Another lesson to learn in all this is that unless you’ve got top notch writers and actors, sequels are often failures, the exception being the original “Star Wars Trilogy”, the Indiana Jones first three movies, and the first two “Alien/s”.
The rest of the Juraissic Park movies were terrible in scripting (the acting wasn’t too bad), even stupid, as were the 3rd and 4th “Aliens”.
And how many times can you have “Rocky” win or lose after the first one which really stood out with a specific theme as its guide. The rest were basically exploitation follow-ups.
The same for the “Planet of the Apes”. If they had left it alone, this would have been one great, stand alone movie which left the viewer to ponder what they had seen and the inner theme of the movie itself.
The same can be said for the later “Terminator” movies, which were not only outlandish, but just plain stupid.
Sometimes you just have to leave things along.
Kurt Russell: Let’s just wait and see what happens.
Great Movie!
Best orginal--The Thing, Howard Hawks' version (1951) with James Arness as the monster. I saw it when I was about 9 yrs old and became imprinted.